Server profiles and resources

Profiles

A profile is a preset for your notebook server: how much CPU and memory it gets, and which image (set of pre-installed software) it starts from. If your hub offers several profiles, you choose one each time you start a server, so you can pick a small environment for light editing and a larger one for heavy computation.

The profiles available, their resource limits, and whether any include extras such as GPUs depend on how your hub was provisioned. Check the spawn screen, or ask your administrator.

What persists

• Your home directory persists between sessions. Keep your notebooks and data here.
• Everything outside your home directory is ephemeral. When the server stops, restarts, or moves to another node, changes made to the container's system directories are gone. Packages installed system-wide will not survive; see Custom environments and packages for installs that do.

Idle shutdown

To free shared resources, idle notebook servers are shut down automatically after a period of inactivity. This stops the running server only; your home directory and its contents are preserved, and you simply start a new server to continue. Save long-running results to disk (or to Sunet Drive) rather than relying on a server staying up.

Resource limits

Each server runs within the CPU and memory limits of its profile. A process that exceeds the memory limit may be terminated by the platform, which shows up as the kernel restarting. If you routinely hit the limit, choose a larger profile if one is available, or ask your administrator about adding one.